Trailblazery founder Kathy Scott introduces the latest installment of Scoil Scairte, a global online learning community on a journey into the heart and soul of Irish culture, heritage and language.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
-David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
Sometimes we are so immersed in the water we can’t witness a watershed moment, but we know something is rising…
A significant cultural moment is emerging in Ireland right now. In an epic twist of fate Brigid, a Goddess in the Celtic Pantheon and revered matron saint of Ireland, is granted a national holiday. The Bean Sídhe has also made a comeback in a dark comic fairy tale The Banshees of Inisherin. Meanwhile Cáit, a nine-year-old girl from a dysfunctional family in rural Ireland, steals our hearts in An Cailín Ciúin, the first Irish-language feature film in history to be shortlisted for an Oscar.
We are living in complex times. We need great stories to nourish and transport us to new realms. The Irish are a nation of great storytellers, it’s in our bones, our blood and our DNA. The stories that have motivated the spirit of our people from the very beginning are now playing out on the world stage today.
In Ireland our people survived adversity and we are here because of their spirit which could not be broken.
The Irish psyche is steeped in magic, we have one of the richest folklore traditions in the world known as "Béaloideas" or mouth education. This repository houses many of the figures that continue to animate our cultural imagination including Brigid, "The Exalted One", and the Bean Sídhe, the supernatural harbinger of death. Our stories were preserved and passed on in our native tongue so that future generations would know who our people are and where we come from. The archetypes, myths and symbols live in a deep time-out-of-time realm but still resonate in our national psyche today.
We need your consent to load this Vimeo contentWe use Vimeo to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
We almost lost this rich inheritance due to the systematic repression of our native cultural practices. Ireland was the first colony of England, we became a laboratory for the colonial project. Our lands were stolen and our place names ripped out at the roots. Our bodies starved and our ancestral tongue suppressed. Our customs and ways of life were prohibited. Our traditions, wisdom and knowledge systems were dismantled. Our communal myths and stories were under threat of destruction. In the process we were forced to inhabit a foreign operating system that created a glitch in the matrix. We had to download a whole new way of being in order to survive. The Irish psyche and soma is marked by the legacy of colonisation, the waters we swim in run deep.
Trauma originates with an experience that the person or the collective is not able to digest. This creates a freezing in the core movement of life. Through bringing our full presence to this, movement can gradually be restored…
Thomas Hubl
When we can name and process the trauma that almost wiped out our people, culture and native language, we will stop repeating and perpetuating the familiar pattern of the past, inside and out.
I have spent the last decade exploring ways to resolve trauma - my own and my ancestors. As I navigated this territory I uncovered many symptoms that had been unconsciously hidden or frozen in my mind-body for years. As I experienced the visceral effects in my own nervous system I came to understand the cumulative effects in the collective nervous system.
I recognised the trauma wounds living in the cultural body as souvenirs of colonisation and subsequent church and state regime. I could see the hallmarks of trauma in our government structures from healthcare and housing to finance, justice and education. I could sense the hangover of internalised trauma in our repetitive cycles of guilt, shame, disconnection, dissociation and addiction.
I have studied with some of the world's leading trauma pioneers including Gabor Maté and Thomas Hübl and learned that on the other side of trauma lies post traumatic growth. I started to wonder if trauma can be passed from generation to generation; What else can be passed down the timeline?
In Ireland our people survived adversity and we are here because of their spirit which could not be broken. We may have inherited trauma but we have also inherited resilience. Dr. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to future generations. She describes resilience as:
"a conscious effort to move forward in an insightful, integrated, positive manner, as a result of lessons learned from adverse experience".
The tides are slowly turning. We are witnessing a ground swell of interest in our culture and ancestral language despite the grim forecasts reported in recent years. There is a new wave of cultural consciousness rising in Ireland, one that includes Brigid, the Banshee and the beautiful expression of our native language. Ancient as the rivers themselves, native practices carry indigenous ways of knowing with ecological, cultural and spiritual memory from the ancestors upstream to the generations yet to come.
Perhaps, as Liam Ó Maonlaí says "the language has a karma all of its own". An Ghaeilge is one of the oldest living languages in the world. Our mother tongue was almost eradicated but is still alive today despite a turbulent history. So to witness An Cailín Ciúin on the road to the Oscars might just be one of those 'great sea-change’ moments Seamus Heaney talked about. A watershed moment for Irish cultural identity when
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
Yes, something is rising. We can feel it in our waters. So how do we navigate these waters of cultural change?
We need your consent to load this Vimeo contentWe use Vimeo to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Watch: Focail agus Fís le Manchán: An Loch
Scoil Scairte is our offering. In collaboration with Manchán Magan we are curating a 9-week immersion in Irish cultural heritage that weaves language, place, identity and wellbeing with community and kinship. Many language learners say that they find a new personality in their second language. Already I can see that the Irish language gives me access to a part of myself that is wild, free and full of possibility.
Bí in éineacht linn - Join us.
The latest semester of Scoil Scairte runs on Thursdays from Mar 02nd - Apr 27th 2023 - find out more here.
